Henry and me

Kevin Frisch

Wednesday

May 30, 2007 at 12:01 AMMay 30, 2007 at 2:38 AM

Funny Thing ... Then and now

The pace of life today doesn't give much time for sitting on the front porch. The pace of traffic on the street doesn't permit kids to sit on the curb, just outside the nimbus of the street lamp, reviewing the day's events or planning for the future as we kids in Linden Street used to do every summer's night.
It's true; the more things change, the more they stay the same. Those words appeared in a collection of writings by the late Henry Clune published in 1933.
Clune was a longtime Democrat and Chronicle columnist. The piece from which the above passage was culled, "Linden Street," was included in the 1933 publication, which took its title from his newspaper column, "Seen & Heard." Mr. Clune had been writing the column for almost 20 years at this point in his career. He would continue it another 35. He continued to write and publish throughout his lengthy retirement, finally putting down his pen for good in 1995 at the age of 105.
To read Clune's columns some three generations after they first took shape in ink is to bump up against a Rochester that is at once familiar and phantasmagoric. The locales he describes are not unknown today Ñ Mount Hope Avenue, Linden Street the Eastman Kodak Co. And some of those that no longer exist live on in memories, such as the Rochester Telephone Co.
But there is a patina of nostalgia coating Clune's well-crafted passages. This is not because he intentionally invoked such a feeling but because the life he describes is, in many ways, lost to the ages.
Homes still catch fire and burn, but not as they did in Clune's day: "(The firemen's) tiny chemical tanks had exhausted their supplies without laying a single flame; their bucket brigade had dried a well and achieved no salvage."
Pittsford hostesses still strive to impress their dinner guests, but do not fret they may have poisoned them with hand-picked mushrooms Ñ a few of which had first been fed to the dog Ñ as they did in Clune's day: "The maid came through the door, her face curiously white, her eyes red and staring ...
"'The dog is dead,' the maid said."
No, things were different in Clune's day, even if many of the situations he documented were the stuff of life today: a) Henry essaying unsuccessfully to get his three rambunctious boys washed and ready for breakfast; b) Henry ticking off a list of the things that tick him off; c) Henry dragged by his wife to a dance recital.
But Clune's description is of its time.
A) "Scrub," admonished the Master. "Harder! Behind the ears!"
"I'm scrubbing."
"You're not scrubbing."
"I'm too scrubbing."
B) I hate female impersonators, socks with holes in them, girls who dress in men's trousers, and people who limit their conversation to sex ...
C) "I don't just get the first number," I says, nudging the missus. "Who's 'Hymnus'? What's 'Aufbruch'? And why 'Departure'?"
"The folks around here," cracks the missus, "come to see the dancing, not to hear me put you through an intelligence test."
There is a gentleness to these pieces that is even reflected in the titles: "Puttering," "Ain't Nature Grand!" "The Temptress and the Scribe (A Parable)."
They could not be more different from the bellicose bombast that fills too many column inches in too many publications these days.
I had dinner with Henry late in his life. He had already commenced his second century. He still wrote every day and he limited himself to one pre-meal martini an evening. What drove him to stay at his writing, I wondered.
"I'm just trying to get better," he answered, 80-plus years after first joining a newspaper in 1910.
And so, I try to emulate Henry Clune. To maintain good work ethics and to infuse some occasional gentleness and to just continue to try to get better.
It's not easy. Especially that part about the one martini.
Kevin Frisch is managing editor of the Daily Messenger, which circulates in Ontario, Wayne and Yates counties. Contact him at (585) 394-0770/Ext. 257 or by e-mail at kfrisch@mpnewspapers.com.